Improving the customer experience

TELUS achieves a strong, unified view of its 13 million customers

TELUS, a leading national telecommunications company in Canada, provides a comprehensive and innovative suite of communications services to both residential and business customers. Offerings include communications products and services such as wireless, data, Internet protocol (IP), voice, television, entertainment and video.

In order to best serve its clients, TELUS must have a comprehensive and accurate view of each individual, including which services they have (or would be eligible for) and their history with the company. Using the SAS Data Management solution TELUS achieved a strong unified view of its 13 million customers by providing a holistic view gleaned through integrating its customer information across the board.

As part of its vision to continuously improve the customer experience through delivering tailored product and service offers across product lines, TELUS embarked on a program to further integrate customer information. Integrating customer information such as customer profiles and product lines helped to create a more centralized and accurate view of customer information necessary to benefit their customer service experience.

SAS provides us with increased confidence that we are making decisions ... enabling us to best serve our clients by delivering offers for products and services that best meet their needs.

Tanja Glisin
Senior Enterprise Architect

Building a singular, reliable and consistent customer view

TELUS wanted a solution that would be internally managed while also empowering business users to work directly with the technology, rather than requiring intervention by IT teams. Not only was this central to the need to base offers on a single, accurate view of its customer data, but also to improve data quality and governance by requiring all parties to work with that singular view in a single technology hub.

As part of a relationship with SAS that has spanned more than five years, TELUS invested in SAS Data Management. The solution allows the company to:

Manage multiple and diverse data sources.

Implement rules to flag inaccuracies in customer records.

Monitor, control and govern customer data so that it is accurate, complete and consistent.

SAS Data Management also includes a centralized Web portal that provides users from across the organization with access to a consistent, high-quality, unified version of all client-related data. This empowers greater collaboration across teams, eliminates delays related to information sharing, and ensures each team member works with the most accurate and up-to-date information.

“SAS Data Management has helped us expose potential challenges and potential data issues to other teams from the onset of a project when planning project scope. This has made it much easier for us to estimate costs and work requirements. In short, it gave us increased confidence that data is fit for its intended use,” says Tanja Glisin, Senior Enterprise Architect for TELUS.

The results

Using SAS Data Management, TELUS users realized the solution was very effective at uncovering data errors in addition to monitoring against set targets going forward. The team quickly learned that SAS could be used at the onset as well as throughout a project to ensure data quality across its life cycle. Ultimately, helping them realize time savings, team efficiency and instilling confidence in the end results.

A detailed set of rules was created to continuously review client records and company systems to directly alert users of potential errors. Errors discovered can then be corrected by the team to ensure integrated offers are made only where appropriate.

These rules have also enabled daily detection and reporting of potential systems errors. Through this early detection, significant operational efficiencies have been achieved. By reducing the duration of the systems issues, the scope of the issue is limited – therefore reducing the amount of time it takes to fix.

Furthermore, organizational data governance improved since all required data was centralized and housed in a single platform accessible to all teams involved in the program. Access and security policies were easily enforced across all team members. With SAS Data Management, the central web portal is accessible by the whole team so only one set of data is worked on, thereby eliminating the need to correct information in multiple locations.

The success of SAS Data Management during the integrated offers program caused significant interest in the solution across the company. Resulting in the technology’s successful application to smaller-scale projects for different business units, extending the return on investment from the solution.

“SAS became an important part of our success with the integrated offers program. Using SAS provides us increased confidence that we are making decisions with timely and accurate data, enabling us to best serve our clients by delivering offers for products and services that best meet their needs” says Glisin. “By providing a daily report on data inconsistencies, we can quickly spot the potential issues. This means the errors are fixed quickly, saving both time and money.”

Glisin continued: “At the same time, the solution helped me advance the vision of my team, and their ability to give business users the tools they need, empowering them to transform how we do business, both internally and externally. Gaining the trust of our business users in effective and efficient technologies means TELUS will continue to innovate in the market in every way possible.”

Challenge

Ensure quality in a unified customer view across multiple lines of business in order to present customers with highly targeted, integrated offers for products and services.

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.